The Rebus Approach
Having explored multiple external perspectives in the scholarly reading ecosystem, we turn now to sharing ours as well. We believe, based on our experience, values and the issues raised by our interviewees, that open, web-based technical solutions are essential for addressing the needs of scholarly deep readers. It is our view that only in an open technical ecosystem can deliver on the promise of digital reading technology, an ecosystem built for interoperability of reading platforms with external tools, a reading system that can be built upon and innovated upon. Reading is the starting point of scholarly activity, but it is only the starting point, and tools need to be developed to support all the other things scholars wish to do: from reading and annotating, through the management of collections, notes and reading contexts, to their reuse and recrafting into whole new bodies of work.
To date, the commercial platforms supporting digital reading are not answering this need. We believe there is space for a new, open model of digital scholarly reading, that is expressly built to encourage, rather than discourage, interoperability.
Open, Open, Open
The history of human knowledge is written in, on, and with open, available, and accessible technologies: language, writing, paper, pens, typewriters, printing presses. No proprietary or closed technology has survived the tests of time to preserve and propagate the continuous progress of scholarly investigation. In the digital world, the movements of Open Web, Open Content Licenses, and Open Source Software tools continue with this imperative today.
The advent of digital information technologies has made possible entirely unprecedented deep engagement and manipulation of information and knowledge; and yet so far, for much of scholarly content, we have locked it up in closed technologies and business models.
The future of scholarly work, and the human progress that depends on it, lies in Open.
Open Content
For scholarly endeavors to thrive and continue their contributions to human progress, source materials must be available not just for looking at and reading, but manipulating, extracting, annotating, quoting, copying, reworking, recontextualizing, and pushing further forward. This means doing away with DRM and enabling direct access, manipulation, and reuse of content. At its most radical, this imperative suggests Open Licences. But, we needn’t be so radical to hugely improve the scholarly reading ecosystem. Simply letting scholars who have legitimate access to digital content (through library or private purchase) use and manipulate that content as they wish to support their scholarship is radical enough.
Open Standards / Open Web Platform
Unfettered innovation in new ways of interacting with scholarly materials depends on interoperable, open standards-based approaches. The Web, whose very fabric and existence depends on such, is the natural model and platform.
Publishers must be involv